[mncolinlee]

It seems that there are certain skills which are difficult to hire trained workers for. However, the real problem is very, very few IT employers are willing to take any risk and train skilled, U.S. workers.

This is the opposite of how technology employment used to work. Factories could not hire enough trained workers, so they trained them on the job. It never ceases to amaze me how HR insists on skills with a particular niche technology. Often, no tightly-related skills will suffice even for junior positions i.e. Mercurial instead of Git.

Also, everyone wants to hire senior employees who specialized in one technology for most of a career. Finding someone like that is becoming less and less common.

I remember one position years ago when I was still in college where the recruiters demanded five years of job experience with Windows 2000 or they were not interested. The product had not existed that long. The only person qualified to take the job was a liar.

[yuhong]

AFAIK 5 years is the minimum length of the mainstream support period for MS products, and is the length for Win2000.